In this lesson, you will learn about the lineage of Creative Breathwork.
We will go into the history and background to give you an understanding about where it comes from. This will help you get a better understanding of why we do the things we do.
You will also learn about the spirituality behind this lineage of breathwork. There is a very interesting story behind this lineage of breathwork.
A long and rich spiritual heritage from India and the immortal yogi, Sri Babaji.
History of Breathwork
Contemporary breathwork is conscious breathing,
Usually lying down utilising the navel, chest and upper chest movement for each breath, and the breath having no pause between the in breath and the out breath.
Contemporary or modern breathwork is different to pranayama
Pranayama are ancient yogic techniques, which are normally practised in a seated pose and utilise a range of variations – the individual in both cases is breathing consciously.
Modern Breathwork
Contemporary and modern breathwork –Started in the USA in the 1960’s and was called Rebirthing in the first years because so many people had a spontaneous regression to the birth experience in a subtle or intense form.
This seems to be a result of people having an experience of an altered state from breathing in this way and trauma or restrictions in the systems of these people who were wanting to go deeper into their authentic selves as a path of self mastery or personal development, would find themselves experiencing birth memories – mostly the traumatic stage of their circumstances at birth.
Acknowledged founder of modern breathwork.
There has been a number of people involved in the early movement and some of them were connected to the immortal yogi Babji from Hadikan in India, who resided in the foothills of the Himalaya in the 1970s and also spoke of his many other previous incarnations. His ashram used ceremonies which included the sacred fire ceremony, havan or yagna. His main message is truth, simplicity and love.
Leonard Orr and many of his associates visited Babaji, who is said to be the yogi with mastery over the physical as spoken of in the book “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Paramahansa Yogananda – written in the mid 1900s and an international best seller for many years.
Leonard Orr, Stanislav Grof, Sondra Ray, Pauline Win and others …. Rebirthing Breathwork is a form of conscious breathwork founded by Leonard Orr, an American, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Another form of conscious breathwork, was founded by Dr Stanislav Grof, a European psychiatrist, in the late 1970s. It was later named Holotropic Breathwork ™
Leonard Orr founded conscious breathing as one of the aspects of spiritual purification.
In his intuitive intervention approach, there is breathing guidance at different points and no encouragement for movement or emotion. His main interest is in teaching people to breathe energy as well as air, and to release the birth/death cycle.
Stanislav Grof founded conscious breathing that has a distinct emphasis on pressure and force on the breath in the session with a prearranged client directed approach to intervention. In the background is usually loud music that induces movement and emotions – some of which can be extreme – with specific support for release. His main interest is in the healing potential of non-ordinary states.
Sondra Ray worked initially with Leonard Orr and branched off into Loving Relationship Training after finding sucess with clients who released birth scripts and personal lies based in their early birth or infancy experiences.
The story of Breathwork
Leonard Orr
Back in the 1960’s a very young Leonard Orr, started experimenting himself with the breath from his late teens, through to his early 20’s. The way he tells it, he had been breathing in the bath, connecting the breath and doing it quite intuitively since he was young. One time, while we was doing his connected breathing in the bath a man came to him and blew his breath onto him. This man, gave him the gift of activated breath. After this other-worldly experience, he started having incredible journeys with the breath. His life was permanently changed and he wanted to find out who this man was and what exactly had happened to him.
Leonard Orr intuitively knew that the man who had visited him and breathed into him was some kind of yogi from India. He gathered three of his friends, and they all travelled to India together. All this was way before mobile phones, the Internet or even the Lonely Planet travel guide. Their mission was to try and find and meet with immortal yogis, and learn their secrets to longevity.
The three friends split up to individually search in different directions with the plan to meet up in three months. They would re-convene and find out if any of them had been able to meet up with an immortal yogi.
Looking for an Immortal Yogi
They all went their separate ways, each on the quest to find an immortal yogi, and three months later they all met up back up, except the woman. Their female friend had not returned, and neither Leonard or his friend had been able to find an immortal yogi.
Some time later, the woman returned to America and told them that she had found and had been living with an immortal yogi, Babaji. She explained that she had been learning breathwork from this immortal master and that they had to return to India so they could learn from him.
They all returned to India and Leonard Orr stayed as a disciple of Babaji, learning about breathwork practices and the elemental work that was part of the lineage of Babaji. The Five Elements are Water, Air, Earth, Fire and Ether.
He was also taught about the deep philosophy behind this work and the spirituality of the breath.
He brought it back to the US, and he just called it simply, “Breathing” or “Breathwork”. They were working very experimentally, they would get in a hot tub together, and breathe together naked. It was the late 1960’s. There are some classic photos of them all together in a tub.
Leonard Orr began to run breathwork groups in the US, and he started to notice an interesting pattern with people in the groups. People were spontaneously going back to the time of their birth and even from before their birth.
People were experiencing memories of being in the womb, of being delivered and their first experiences outside of the womb in the hospital. This was happening over and over again. So the name “Rebirthing Breathwork” actually came out of what was happening to people in these breathwork groups.
They were spontaneously re-experiencing their own births. The potential to integrate and heal the initial birth wounding, which was the trauma of being cut prematurely from the placenta and forced into breathing, was an incredible opportunity and the breath was the only way to heal this
From the 1960’s to now, it’s developed a lot and been refined. Before Leonard Orr and other early practitioners realised how powerful breathwork could be, they were running mass breathwork groups, and people went a bit crazy.
When you have held space, especially if you have ever held space where someone experiences suspended breath, or is really knocking out, or having very strong emotions come up – you will very quickly realise that there needs to be a strong holding of space by someone who has integrated their own birth trauma – and it wouldn’t work to have facilitators stretched, trying to hold space for a large group.
Any deep therapeutic work needs to be done in a smaller group or 1:1. It’s not possible to hold space for trauma and healing processes for a large group.
Groups are great for those who have integrated a lot of their trauma and for new people to learn the breathing technique and experience the emotions and trauma that are held in the body, but to truely heal it their needs to be individual care at first.
My personal journey to Breathwork
I began my awakening journey at an early age off of the back of my mother and grandmother who were both involved in healing. My grandmother in particular was an influence on me from a very early age. My mother would take me to visit my grandmother and they would sit in the kitchen and shoo me away whilst they had their conversations. I would wonder around her house but always end up sitting under her portrait of White Eagle reading one of the many spiritual books that studded her library. Edgar Casey, Jung and Madam Blavatsky to name a few, became my teachers at the tender age of 8 years old. I devoured subjects on Kundalini energy, archetypal psychology, astral travel, (which I became proficient at in my pre teens), reading auras, numerology and astrology. These subjects made so much sense to me and I absorbed the content more than I could ever absorb anything I was learning at school. My Grandmother was a healer at a spiritualist church and I would sometimes go and sit in the audience to receive a healing or a reading, I loved the momentary relief I got from the magic of these places.
Message from White Eagle, Hopi indigenous on 03/16/2020
VISION QUEST
“This moment humanity is going through can now be seen as a portal and as a hole.
The decision to fall into the hole or go through the portal is up to you.
If you repent of the problem and consume the news 24 hours a day, with little energy, nervous all the time, with pessimism, you will fall into the hole. But if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, rethink life and death, take care of yourself and others, you will cross the portal.
Take care of your homes, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual House.
When you are taking care of yourselves, you are taking care of everything else. Do not lose the spiritual dimension of this crisis, have the eagle aspect, that from above, and see the whole; see more broadly.
There is a social demand in this crisis, but there is also a spiritual demand. The two go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. But without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and lack of meaning.
You were prepared to go through this crisis. Take your toolbox and use all the tools available to you.
Learn about resistance of the indigenous and African peoples: we have always been and continue to be exterminated. But we still haven’t stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire and having fun. Don’t feel guilty about being happy during this difficult time.
You do not help at all being sad and without energy. You help if good things emanate from the Universe now. It is through joy that one resists. Also, when the storm passes, each of you will be very important in the reconstruction of this new world.
You need to be well and strong. And, for that, there is no other way than to maintain a beautiful, happy and bright vibration. This has nothing to do with alienation.
This is a resistance strategy. In shamanism, there is a rite of passage called the quest for vision. You spend a few days alone in the forest, without water, without food, without protection. When you cross this portal, you get a new vision of the world, because you have faced your fears, your difficulties …
This is what is asked of you:
Allow yourself to take advantage of this time to perform your vision seeking rituals. What world do you want to build for you? For now, this is what you can do: serenity in the storm. Calm down, pray every day. Establish a routine to meet the sacred every day.
Good things emanate; what you emanate now is the most important thing. And sing, dance, resist through art, joy, faith and love. “
Resist – Be reborn
My Childhood
I grew up in a single parent house with an abusive brother and an alcoholic father whom I had to visit every second weekend with my brother. My mother did her best but she was unable to protect me from the ongoing daily, physical, psychological and emotional abuse from my older brother. This abuse became written on my forehead as an invitation to all the bullies at school to target me. I was severely bullied at school on a daily basis for many years. I spent my childhood learning to tuck my feelings way deep inside, I learned to pretend but the shame was so intense it bubbled up and landed on my body in the form of a weight problem, I was abused on the street by strangers calling me all sorts of horrible names, so I became bulimic as an attempt to control the eating that was trying to numb the pain, and purging the shame I was swallowing on a daily basis. I was in hell.
Drugs and Sex
In my 15th year I discovered drugs from a family who lived a few doors down the road from me, they had a swimming pool, expensive cars and a party every night, I found I could forget my pain with drugs and alcohol and this was such a relief. I spent more time with this family than I did my own. I was a master at hiding my activities and my Mother who had a small child at this stage (My sister, who is 12 years younger than me), my Mother believed I was doing just fine and she forgot about me so I went deep into a dark spiral.
I was ,at this point in my life, suicidal and thinking of ways I could end it, I would have if I didn’t have such a generous helping of hungarian guilt, thanks to my fathers side of the family and I believe if I hadn’t had the spiritual education in my younger years. This spiritual faith was what kept me going, my ability to connect with source energy and my higher guides. I believe they led me onto the path towards my awakening.
After the horrendous school years were over, I found myself at University as an Art student, making art, hanging out with cool people and discovering there was more to life than my small hometown existence. I started to flourish, I met a boy and had my first tumultuous and dramatic relationship. I was hooked! I explored my sexuality like there was no tomorrow, filling up my empty heart with sex and relationships, playing out my abandonment with my boyfriends, until I found myself pregnant with my first child.
Motherhood
I had no idea how to be a parent or to give birth and after an extremely traumatic 42 hour birth that ended in an emergency C-section, my son was born and my true awakening began. I managed to be a mother and a girlfriend for 8 years, I soothed my deep unhappiness with loving my son.
Eight years later I had my second child a daughter and for some reason I couldn’t pretend anymore, their father and I separated when she was two and our son was 10. This was the hardest time of my life, I had breakdowns , I was homeless with my two kids, I was running a healing centre and I was falling apart, my kids were miserable especially my daughter and I was devastated at what I had done with my life. I didn’t know that my early unhealed traumas were being expressed through my current family. I blamed myself and my self esteem plummeted.
Returning to me
This was, I now know, the beginning of my re-awakening, I found myself at a 10 day retreat on the Gold Coast of Australia, to this day I do not remember how I got the money or how I found out about this retreat as I went alone and I had never heard of Breathwork or of Leonard Orr before, non the less I found myself amongst strangers at the weirdest retreat I had ever been on, in fact the first retreat I had ever been on! I believe my guides and my higher self directed me to this retreat.
This was a Rebirthing Breathwork retreat run by Leonard Orr the founder of Rebirthing breathwork. For 10 days I fasted, sat by open fires, swam in rivers and breathed hour long connected breath sessions to bring up past traumas. I was ready to run by day 3 it was so intense and overwhelming, I felt like I had opened pandora’s box and it was bottomless. I didn’t want to feel my pain I wanted to numb it. I stayed for the whole 10 days and I felt a good chunk of my pain. I left this retreat devastated at the realisation that to get my life back I had a lot of work to do.
Deep dive
I come from a lineage of addiction and mental illness, so the drive to self medicate with food and drugs was strong! Once again my guides and my higher self intervened…..I was sitting in my healing centre flicking through a magazine when I came upon an advertisement for a free Breathwork evening, it spiked my interest but it was that night and my laziness was winning, it was at this point that an acquaintance of mine walked up the stairs and asked me how I was and what was I reading, I told her about the free evening and she insisted on driving us both down.
I did a year of this particular Breathwork and it was like a sledgehammer to concrete, it was one of the hardest years of my life, I broke apart.
Becoming the teacher
During this time I was studying Psychology and I continued to train in Breathwork and heal my own trauma’s, after several years I was asked by one of my teachers and mentors to take over her Breathwork training and become a teacher.
I have the deepest gratitude to all of my teachers along the way in particular Leonard Orr and Pauline Win for seeing me and for encouraging me to heal, and for giving me this tool of the breath.
I know now that we are the creators of our lives 100% no one else is in charge unless you allow them to be. To author your own life is a gift of the highest and it is my prayer that we all wake up to our divine selves.
Creative breathwork was born from all of the teachings I have received from my mentors and through my own discovery of my inner authority and divinity and my incredible ability to manifest once I have cleared a specific trauma. Breathwork has cleared and integrated so much of my past pain and trauma and the beliefs I received from the family lineage of trauma I was born into.
I am passionate about teaching people to release themselves from the chains of ancestral unhealed traumas and assisting people to reclaim their sovereignty.
Welcome to Creative Breathwork.
I believe you are here because you are ready to remember, heal and become the divine being you are meant to be!
So much love, respect and friendship.
Redlyn Kym
